Essays on Individual Labor Market Transitions and Aggregate Dynamics PDF Download

Author: Weh-Sol Moon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business cycles
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Author: Huanan Xu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Author: Felicien Jesugo Goudou
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This thesis contributes to understanding labor market frictions and how these frictions impact macroeconomic aggregates such as unemployment and productivity. It also critically examines environmental policies such as carbon taxes and green financing. The first chapter examines how non-compete contracts signed between employers and employees affect unemployment, productivity, and welfare in the economy. These contracts stipulate that the employee, while under contract, cannot work for a competing employer for a specified period, typically ranging from one to two years after separation from their initial employer. This type of contract is widespread in the United States and affects at least one in five employees in the country. Results show that a high enforceable incidence of these contracts can compress wages and generate unemployment. This is primarily due to the fact that some individuals who have signed such contracts face difficulties in finding new employment after separating from their initial job. The article proposes reducing the duration of the post-employment restrictions of these contracts to mitigate their effects on workers. However, it is worth noting that these contracts partially benefit employers by incentivizing them to invest in employee training, thereby increasing overall productivity. Speaking of employment contracts, the second chapter evaluates the implications of the coexistence of temporary contracts (fixed-term contracts) and permanent contracts (indefinite-term contracts) on worker flows between unemployment, employment, and labor force non-participation over the life-cycle. This analysis is particularly important due to the effects of these flows on aggregate employment and wages over the life-cycle. It is found that transitions of individuals from permanent employment to unemployment are the most significant factor explaining aggregate employment over the life-cycle. Any policy aimed at increasing employment should target this flow of workers. Moreover, the transition of individuals from temporary employment to unemployment is significant in explaining the low employment of young individuals in European countries like France, especially for those with higher levels of education. The article goes further by constructing a model that explains the observed transition profiles during agents' life-cycle and analyzes how the effects linked to employment protection reforms in European countries are distributed among workers based on their level of education and age. Finally, the third chapter provides a critical assessment of environmental policies such as emissions taxes on production units and green financing. The article shows that despite their effectiveness in reducing emissions, these policies can negatively impact resource allocation, such as capital, among firms, thus reducing aggregate productivity. This is because some highly productive but seriously financially constrained firms may struggle to invest in emission reduction technology, while less productive but wealthy entrepreneurs invest more easily. The burden of emissions-related fiscal measures forces the former to exit the market, thereby reducing productivity. This suggests that other policies, such as green subsidies, are important to mitigate these potential distortions.

Author: Ahmet Yusuf Mercan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Job mobility – the rate at which employed workers change their jobs without experiencing unemployment in between – plays a significant role in shaping individual level economic outcomes as well aggregate labor market dynamics. At the micro level, workers climb up the job ladder and receive wage increases by changing employers. Experimentation by way of switching jobs leads young workers into their right career paths. At the aggregate level, job mobility might improve the allocative efficiency of the labor market by facilitating the match of productive workers and firms. This dissertation sheds light on two issues pertaining to job mobility in the U.S. Chapter 1 studies the observed decline in employer-to-employer transitions in the U.S. during the last two decades, and proposes an explanation for this downward trend. Chapter 2 proposes a framework for analyzing the excess unemployment risk following a job- to-job transition and lays the groundwork for a broader future research agenda. Chapter 1 starts from the observation that employer-to-employer (E-E) transi- tions have declined in the United States during the last 20 years from a monthly rate of 2.7 percent in 1996 to 1.7 percent in 2016. In this chapter, I study the factors behind this observed decline. I document that most of the decrease in E-E transitions is accounted for by declines in matches with less than 12 months of job tenure. I attribute this decline to an increase in information about the quality of job opportunities. I then develop a search model with heterogenous matches and on-the-job search with learning about match quality. I show that the information channel can be identified from the change in the wage growth of job switchers. I estimate my model and find that workers in recent years have substantially more in- formation about matches before they are formed, turning jobs into inspection goods rather than experience goods. I find that this increase in information explains 50 to 60 percent of the decline in job mobility over the last two decades. Chapter 2 starts from the empirical finding that the risk of job loss is concen- trated in the early months of the job; after the initially high levels of unemployment risk, jobs become stable. This chapter argues that this initial excess exposure to un- employment risk renders job-to-job transitions risky. It formalizes this mechanism in a search and matching model in which job offers are “lotteries”, placing probabilities on job qualities, which are revealed early on in the new job. Workers know the prob- ability weights, and lotteries are heterogeneous in those weights. A set of job quality realizations lead workers to prefer quitting into unemployment. In this model, job mobility is affected by the value of unemployment, which represents the downside risk of accepting a job lottery. This consideration constitutes a mobility friction for employed workers. It explores all these properties and predictions in a calibrated version of the model. The chapter also highlights a new role of unemployment in- surance (UI): In the model, UI insures the downside risk of job-to-job transitions, and thereby subsidizes job mobility of workers already employed, and tilts the job composition to ex-ante riskier jobs. Chapter 2 closes by discussing potential implica- tions of this new view of unemployment insurance. The study therefore sheds light on how labor market policies affect the behavior of employed job seekers through a novel “experimentation subsidy” channel.

Author: Christina Hyde Patterson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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This thesis consists of three chapters on labor market dynamics. In the first chapter, I show empirically that the unequal incidence of recessions is a core channel through which aggregate shocks are amplified. I show that the aggregate marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is larger when income shocks disproportionately hit high-MPC individuals, and I define the Matching Multiplier as the increase in the output multiplier originating from the matching of workers to jobs with different income elasticities - a greater matching multiplier translates into more powerful amplification in a range of business cycle models. Using administrative data from the United States, I document that the earnings of individuals with a higher marginal propensity to consume are more exposed to recessions. I show that this covariance between worker MPCs and the elasticity of their earnings to GDP is large enough to increase shock amplification by 40 percent over a benchmark in which all workers are equally exposed. Using local labor market variation, I validate this amplification mechanism by showing that areas with higher matching multipliers experience larger employment fluctuations over the business cycle. Lastly, I derive a generalization of the matching multiplier in an incomplete markets model and show numerically that this mechanism is quantitatively similar within this structural framework. In the second chapter, joint with David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence Katz, and John Van Reenen, we explore the well-documented fall of labor's share of GDP in the United States and many other countries. Existing empirical assessments typically rely on industry or macro data, obscuring heterogeneity among firms. In this paper, we analyze micro panel data from the U.S. Economic Census since 1982 and document empirical patterns to assess a new interpretation of the fall in the labor share based on the rise of "superstar firms." If globalization or technological changes advantage the most productive firms in each industry, product market concentration will rise as industries become increasingly dominated by superstar firms. Since these firms have high markups and a low labor share of firm value-added and sales, this depresses the aggregate labor share. We empirically assess seven predictions of this hypothesis: (i) industry sales will increasingly concentrate in a small number of firms; (ii) industries where concentration rises most will have the largest declines in the labor share; (iii) the fall in the labor share will be driven largely by reallocation rather than a fall in the unweighted mean labor share across all firms; (iv) the between-firm reallocation component of the fall in the labor share will be greatest in the sectors with the largest increases in market concentration; (v) the industries that are becoming more concentrated will exhibit faster growth of productivity and innovation; (vi) the aggregate markup will rise more than the unweighted firm markup; and (vii) these patterns should be observed not only in U.S. firms, but also internationally. We find support for all of these predictions. In the third chapter, I explore how the distribution of tasks across industries affects labor market responses to shocks. I present a model in which task-level wages connect industries employing the same tasks, meaning that the distribution of tasks across industries insures some workers against shocks and alters their labor market experiences. Workers trained in more dispersed tasks (e.g. accountants) face less unemployment risk from industry-specific shocks than workers who do tasks that are concentrated in few industries (e.g. petroleum engineers). Using industry and regional data, I show empirical evidence that supports the model's predictions - industries that employ more specialized labor contract less in response to demand shocks than industries with less specialized labor. JEL Classifications: E21, J23, D33

Author: Solomon W. Polachek
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1787564614
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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This volume contains seven original and innovative articles which analyze labor market transitions, how individuals progress from school to work, choose a particular occupation, move up the job ladder, and finally withdraw from the workforce to retirement. Investigations are done by race and gender; and social implications are examined.

Author: John Vanderkamp
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Author: Christina Gathmann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Border patrols
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Author: Minsong Liang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Author: Pierre-Richard Agénor
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1451854781
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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This paper examines the role of the labor market in the transmission process of adjustment policies in developing countries. It begins by reviewing the recent evidence regarding the functioning of these markets. It then studies the implications of wage inertia, nominal contracts, labor market segmentation, and impediments to labor mobility for stabilization policies. The effect of labor market reforms on economic flexibility and the channels through which labor market imperfections alter the effects of structural adjustment measures are discussed next. The last part of the paper identifies a variety of issues that may require further investigation, such as the link between changes in relative wages and the distributional effects of adjustment policies.